Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, August 16, 2000

A lawsuit filed in San Francisco on Monday is continuing the debate sparked by San Mateo's Napster Inc. over who should profit from intellectual property distributed on the Internet.

This time, the works in question are not songs, but articles written by free-lance authors and resold on the Internet by three database companies, including the search engine Northern Light.

But as in the Napster case, the plaintiff's supporters cast the suit as a battle to save copyright's function as a stimulus for creative work.

"The reason we're fighting so hard for these issues is that we believe that (copyright protection) is vital for culture to survive," said Jonathan Tasini, president of the National Writer's Union, which has long been active on the issue of royalties for free-lancers.

Although the databases being sued buy the rights to the material they distribute from the magazines or newspapers that first published them, the suit claims that the databases should also get permission from the original authors and pay the authors a portion of revenues from the resale of their work.

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A group of four free-lance writers, including the estate of Oakland writer Jessica Mitford, author of "The American Way of Death," is applying for class-action status, which would give them the right to represent as many as 10,000 free-lancers whose articles are included in the databases. Among the suit's charges is that excerpts from Mitford's book, "The American Way of Birth" were distributed by one of the database companies without authorization.

Tasini likened the databases' business to fencing jewelry that is known to be stolen. "They are profiting off of stolen goods," said Tasini, who as a free-lance writer won a similar case against the New York Times by appeal in 1999.

But the defendants say they respect copyright laws and pay royalties to their suppliers -- the original publishers. Besides Northern Light, the lawsuit names Thompson Corp. and its Foster City subsidiary Gale Group, as well as Bell & Howell, which produces ProQuest, an article archive popular with schools and libraries.

David Seuss, chief executive of Northern Light, dismissed comparisons to the case involving Napster, the company that the music industry has sued to stop free distribution of copyright music.

"Napster wasn't paying Sony every time someone downloaded one of their songs," Seuss said. "We pay those people. There's no piracy here."

Gary Fergus, attorney for the free-lance writers, said that in a way the databases' business is an even worse copyright violation than Napster's, because their databases charge money for the material they distribute -- anywhere from a few dollars for one downloaded article to thousands of dollars in corporate subscriptions.

Besides an injunction to stop the resale of their work under the current system, the writers seek an unspecified amount of money for damages and lost royalties. Recent cases between writers and Internet database firms settled both in court and less formally have resulted in back payments to free-lancers and changes in the way the companies do business.

A Denver database company called UnCover settled a similar lawsuit by agreeing to pay free-lancers royalties, and paid $7.25 million in back royalties. Earlier this month, Contentville.com and the National Writer's Union agreed that free-lancers will receive 30 percent of the download fee (usually several dollars) each time Contentville.com resells their articles. The Contentville.com agreement stipulates that the writers receive a bigger cut than the original publishers get, according to the union.

Tasini, the union president, acknowledged that royalties on republished work, whether in print or on the Internet, represent a relatively small portion of most free- lance writers' income. But as new technologies present new opportunities to reuse material and more writers negotiate for reuse royalties, it's becoming a more-important source of income, he said.

The lawsuit's defendants were chosen because they are among the biggest companies that resell previously published content online, Fergus said. Northern Light has 20 million articles in its database, ProQuest archives the full contents of 8,000 publications, and Thompson's Gale Group archives 6,000 publications in a database containing about 15 million articles, according to the suit.

Fergus said the defendants will soon be served with papers regarding the suit. A court date has not been set.